The victory at the Oryn Estuary had sent shockwaves through the Empire's economy, but the jubilance in Oakhaven was short-lived. Deacon knew that a wounded monopoly was more dangerous than a healthy one. The Syndicate, stripped of their Coastal Trade Contract and humiliated by the SS Integrity, had vanished from the main river channels. They weren't fighting for the current anymore; they were fighting for the future, and their methods shifted from competition to cold, calculated sabotage.
The "Grand Western Canal" was most vulnerable at the Iron-Grip Cleft, a two-mile stretch where the waterway narrowed as it cut through a ridge of solid basalt. It was the only section where the canal lacked a bypass, a bottleneck necessitated by the sheer cost of excavating the rock.
"Pressure drop in the western lock-house, David," Miller reported, slamming a telegram onto the chart table in the Oakhaven-West command center. "The sensors are showing a total blockage at the Cleft. The midday grain-convoy is backed up for three miles. The lead barge reports a 'collision,' but the water is too silted to see what they hit."
Deacon didn't hesitate. He gathered a specialized salvage crew and boarded the SS Resilience, a heavy-lift variant of the iron barge equipped with high-torque winches and submersible diving bells. As they approached the Iron-Grip Cleft, the scale of the sabotage became clear.
The Syndicate had not just sunk a ship; they had engineered a masterpiece of obstruction. They had taken three of their oldest, largest stone-hauling barges, lashed them together with heavy iron chains, and filled them with quick-setting alchemical cement. They had then scuttled them perfectly across the narrowest part of the Cleft. The resulting "Sunk-Wall" was a five-hundred-ton mass of stone, iron, and concrete that sat firmly on the canal bed, blocking all traffic and threatening to turn the canal into a stagnant swamp.
"They didn't just sink them," Miller hissed, staring into the dark water. "They fused them to the basalt floor. Traditional winches won't budge this. We'd snap the cables before the cement even cracked."
"Then we don't pull up," Deacon said, his Logistical Insight already calculating the physics of the blockage. "We push down, then we lift. We're going to use Hydrostatic Buoyancy and Pneumatic Displacement."
Deacon's plan was a radical application of Archimedes' principle. Instead of trying to haul the dead weight against the suction of the mud and the grip of the cement, he directed the crew to manufacture a series of "Caissons"—massive, open-bottomed iron cylinders.
Under Deacon's direction, the salvage crew lowered the caissons around the sunken barges. Once in place, high-pressure air from the Resilience's boilers was pumped into the cylinders, forcing the water out and creating a massive upward lift.
"We need more than just air, David," Miller shouted over the roar of the compressors. "The cement is still holding them to the rock!"
"That's where the Hydraulic Rams come in," Deacon replied.
He had the crew lower heavy iron beams into the silt, positioning them beneath the edges of the sunken hulls. These beams were connected to a series of portable hydraulic jacks driven by the barge's steam engine. By exerting thousands of pounds of concentrated pressure on specific points of the hull, they could break the "suction seal" of the mud and crack the brittle alchemical cement.
For twelve hours, the Cleft was a battlefield of steam and iron. The air smelled of sulfur and wet stone. Slowly, the groaning of the metal beneath the water began to change. A sharp, thunderous crack echoed through the canyon—the sound of the alchemical cement finally fracturing under the relentless hydraulic force.
"She's moving!" a lookout cried.
The sunken mass, lightened by the air-filled caissons and nudged by the hydraulic rams, began to drift upward. It was a slow, agonizing ascent, but once the "Sunk-Wall" lost its grip on the bottom, the buoyancy did the rest. The mass of stone and iron breached the surface like a dead whale, the water cascading off its rusted decks.
Deacon didn't wait to celebrate. He had the Resilience tow the wreckage out of the channel and into a nearby marsh, clearing the path. Within the hour, the grain-convoy began to move again, the steam-whistles of the barges sounding a defiant chorus through the Cleft.
"The Syndicate didn't expect us to have the lifting capacity," Julian said, joining Deacon on the deck of the Resilience. "They thought they could kill the canal with a single blow. But David, this was just a delaying tactic. Varth is desperate. He knows the more grain we move, the more his power base in the South dissolves."
"He's trying to make the canal look 'unreliable' to the Imperial investors," Deacon said, wiping a smudge of hydraulic oil from his face. "But he's failing. Every time he breaks something and we fix it with better tech, we prove that the Oakhaven Standard is superior to their tradition. We aren't just clearing a canal, Julian. We're clearing a way of thinking."
As the sun set over the Cleft, Deacon looked at the shattered remains of the Syndicate's sabotage. He realized that the industrialization of the Empire was no longer a matter of building machines; it was a matter of out-engineering the sabotage of a dying world. The "Grand Western Canal" was open, but the war for the infrastructure had just entered its most violent phase.